


Come Back Unbidden

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Blue Jungle (The Sentinel), Community: spook_me, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 22:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21204782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: A brief street brawl leads to weirdness about the loft, and Jim's discovery that there was one last little thing that Blair hadn't been prepared to talk to him about.





	Come Back Unbidden

**Author's Note:**

> I work out my TSbyBS issues via blue jungle mysticism once again. Very, very pre-slash, but not really gen either. Sorry about that, folks...
> 
> My title is from a poem by Rae Armantrout, a writer I didn't know until I plugged in some key words to hunt down a title. (Titles are hard, always.) Her poem is not strictly about ghosts, but then neither is this story.

Blair didn’t have much money right now – Rainier was barely past but might as well be ancient history, and the Academy was still weeks away – so Jim was offering a lot of rides. Lawyers, off and on again temporary jobs, Blair had places to be, and Jim would get him to them. It was what friends did, especially when things had been rough and you wanted to smooth those rough patches over.

The quickest road route to the latest crappy money earner was down Hallstone Street. Quickest, but most depressing.

“Good ol’ Hellstone,” Blair muttered, looking but not staring at the street people who congregated in this area. This wasn’t somewhere outsiders made eye contact, even from the passing safety of a vehicle.

Jim made a noncommittal noise of agreement. Most of the cops in Cascade were familiar with Hallstone, especially if they’d ever done a local stint in Patrol. Drug addicts, the mentally ill, the misfits, they all ended up wandering Hallstone Street at some point. Jim was pretty certain that some people both on these sidewalks and in the PD forgot that Hellstone was a nickname.

Blair’s ‘just another morning’ slouch disappeared as he pointed off to the side of the road. “Oh man, that looks like trouble!”

Jim was already wrenching the truck to the curb. “I see it, Chief.”

Two men were squaring up together. One was shirtless, with shaggy blond hair and a dirty, scraggly beard. The other, a middle-aged guy skinny all over except for a little pot tummy was armed with what looked a lot like a broom pole. Blond and shirtless looked more threatening for all that, and Jim was out of the truck and facing him. 

“Settle down,” Jim said, one hand out in a gesture that might be admonitory, could be encouraging. He focused entirely on this guy; Blair would warn him of trouble behind him. “Just settle down.”

“I’m sick of him trying to take my spot. This is my space, mine,” blond guy snarled. He looked Jim up and down, and whether he registered the badge shiny at Jim’s belt or not, he didn’t question Jim’s right to interfere; but he remained intent only on his grievance.

“Yeah, sure, sure. That would piss anyone off, but you’ve got your spot, buddy, you’ve made your point.” Jim took a chance – something about the man’s stance suggested veteran. “You can stand down now.”

“He can stand down. Stand down, walk away, fuck off.” Blond guy turned away to address the gathering crowd. “You can all fuck off!” he bellowed. “Hey! Hey, leave my shit alone!” Another man had been sidling towards a pile of belongings, and blond guy charged. The new challenger decided that it wasn’t worth it, and took to his heels, blondie shaking his fist at him and yelling more obscenities in triumph.

Jim stood poised. Sometimes these spats ended here, and sometimes people got a head of rage on. Then Blair, from somewhere behind, said “Oh shit.”

Jim turned. No direct threat to him, but broomstick guy was thrusting his makeshift weapon hard into another man’s stomach. The man staggered back but didn’t loosen his clench on the knife in his hand. It shone in the morning sun as he stumbled and flailed, tripping over someone’s blanket of tacky goods laid out on the sidewalk. He went down prone, with a shocked, breathless groan. The hand with the knife was under him and blood rose fresh to Jim’s nose. The man had stabbed himself as he fell.

Broomstick guy didn’t realise, or didn’t care. He made to hit the fallen man until Jim yanked him back. Broomstick either didn’t like whatever he saw in Jim’s face, or he’d caught a glimpse of Jim’s badge at his belt. He backed down and shuffled aside. His gaze turned to the man on the ground, who’d begun writhing in a tight, awkward frenzy; Jim had seen that movement before more than once, and knew nothing good was happening. Blair was kneeling beside him, trying to see what the damage was.

Broomstick gaped in horror and yelled, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it! He came at me, you all saw it, he came at me!” 

“I’m a cop,” Jim said, at which Broomstick looked even more horrified. It seemed that Jim could be just that intimidating, which was hopefully going to help now that everything had gone to shit. “Shut up, sit down over there, and don’t move!” Jim commanded, before he pulled out his phone to call emergency services. Blondie was glowering from his prized, precious spot but not approaching, which was about the one good thing in this mess. Blair’s hands were already bright red. It was too late for the gloves in the first aid kit that Jim had in the truck, but he got it out anyway because there were dressings in there. 

“No, don’t do that,” he heard Blair say. “Oh for…” Stab victim had pulled out the knife in a panic, despite Blair trying to stop him; this guy was just rolling with the bad choices today, and by the noises coming out of him he’d worked that out too late. “Jim?” Blair called, and Jim was by his side, thrusting the dressings at him. They were pitifully inadequate.

“Here,” a woman said. She was thin almost to the point of emaciation, but neat enough, and she offered a clean towel.

“Don’t waste your good things on that shithead,” one of the bystanders called.

The towel was in Blair’s hands but not on the wound as the man began to struggle again, wailing obscenities. Jim stepped over him to kneel behind and forcibly brace him. “We’re trying to help you. Stay still!”

The woman with the towel offered the spirited opinion that she’d do what she fucking well pleased with her own stuff, the crowd of bystanders gawked and muttered with little sympathy for the man on the ground, and there were sirens sounding in the distance. It was all chaos, marked with the smell of blood and worse, and the frantic noises of the man bleeding onto the sidewalk despite everything Blair tried. Blair lifted his eyes from the man under his hands to Jim. Jim nodded encouragingly – you’re doing fine, that nod meant, and Blair nodded in his turn, before putting all his concentration, and Jim knew the power of Blair’s concentration, on the wounded man once more.

He was maybe in his fifties, although Jim knew that the wear of the streets could be deceiving. “Not fair,” the man whined. “Not fair, not fuckin’ fair.”

“Yeah, yeah, man, I know. But try to stay still, will you, try to stay still.” Blair’s voice fell into a soothing murmur, maybe to comfort himself, because the man refused to be comforted, just repeated his chant. Not fair, not fair.

~*~

They had to drive home again to change their clothes. Trying not to touch anything in the truck, Blair explained his lateness to his current employer, and was told to not bother coming back. “And screw you too, asshole,” he said with uncharacteristic bitterness to his phone, if not to the asshole in question himself. Jim, on his own call, couldn’t quite see Simon’s ‘only Sandburg and Ellison’ eye roll through his phone, even with sentinel abilities; but it was a close-run thing.

“Time to go, Chief,” he said, and they drove back the way they came.

“You okay?” Blair asked from the passenger seat.

Jim frowned in confused irritation. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. I’m just getting a vibe here. You have different kinds of quiet, and this is the not okay quiet.”

“I’m fine,” Jim said. “It was a crappy thing to happen but these things happen.”

“They certainly seem to happen to us,” Blair said. And that crystallised it for Jim, because he knew his quiet was, as Blair had so matter of factly put it, not the okay quiet. Before, when things happened, and it was a varied range of ‘things’ wasn’t it – well, that was Blair’s choice; he was getting his dissertation out of all the risks he met in travelling on Jim’s coat tails. And in a few weeks’ time Blair would have that academy stipend, he’d be paid to press his hands against some idiot who’d fallen on his own knife. But if Jim tried to explain how this time round felt wrong, he suspected he’d only end up implying that Blair needed some quid pro quo for being around Jim. That would have been disastrous (and untrue) at any time, and especially so now.

“I just wish they didn’t happen to you so much.”

“How do you mean?” Blair asked, his attention sharply on Jim, and now Jim was in for it, wasn’t he? “I’m not some delicate flower, man, and this is going to be everyday life pretty soon, like it wasn’t already. And I will cope, okay?”

“Yeah. I know you will.”

“Fine, then.” And that was the end of that conversation, thank Christ.

~*~

It was procedure that any officer who came into contact with bodily fluid such as blood, (or piss, or spit, or shit or anything else) in the course of duty, or something approximating it like trying to break up an incipient brawl while driving to work, needed to have a blood test to establish immediate HIV and hepatitis statuses. Blair, not an officer, also had his blood taken because Blair could be an idiot about plenty of things, but at least not about taking what precautions he could after his hands had worn someone else’s blood like grubby red gloves.

It was hardly the first time Blair had needed some sort of hospital care or medical intervention working with Jim. It wasn’t even that serious – skin integrity looked good on them both, to quote the doctor they saw, and this was very likely no more than a formality. Jim had his blood taken; he had no needle phobia and the pain was nothing, but he found that this was a day to think about dialling down and ignoring the tightness in his arm, the prick of discomfort, the smells and the sounds of where he was. When it was done he came out of the little room to find Blair with his phone in his hand.

“Simon called me. Figured that I’d want to know that the guy we tried to help didn’t make it. Stanley Wilson. That was his name.”

“I’m sorry, Sandburg.”

“Life in the big city, little buddy,” Blair drawled. He didn’t often use nicknames, but this one came out on occasion and was always ridiculous. He more usually treated Jim’s name as something that he had a lifetime lease on – not his, admittedly, but for his use at all times. 

The nurse called Blair’s name and he stood. She was pretty, but there was no more than a shadow of the usual flirtatious appreciation on Blair’s face. 

“If you say so, Chief,” Jim replied. “Want some real lunch in the big city after, instead of sandwiches?”

Jim got a warmer smile by far than the pretty nurse as Blair shrugged. “Could be an idea.”

He went in to have his blood taken, while Jim sat and waited for him.

“Where do you want to go,” he asked when Blair came out.

Blair thought a moment. “That bar on Dovedale? With the hamburgers and the homemade pickles?”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “You’re in an All-American mood today.”

“They have good burgers. Grilled. With a salad,” Blair said meaningfully. As in, forget the fried crap, Ellison, today you at least pretend to eat healthily.

The bar on Dovedale it was. It was quiet – the wider Cascade lunch crowd didn’t appreciate their homemade pickles, perhaps, which showed a lack of discernment on their part. The food was good, but Blair picked at his bun without much appetite.

“You okay?” Jim asked.

“A little down, but I’ll be fine.”

“You tried, Sandburg. That’s the main thing. “

“I wonder – would he have done what he did if he’d thought I was a cop?”

“Half of that crowd figured I was one even before I announced it and it didn’t seem to stop him. You can’t let yourself get twisted up about some no-account crazy like that. That just makes you crazy instead.”

“No-account, man? Crazy? That seems pretty harsh. You don’t know how he ended up on the streets. That happens for all sorts of reasons.”

Jim thought of some of the comments he’d overheard from the crowd gathered around. He’d gotten the impression that Stan Wilson hadn’t been well liked. Not liked at all.

“Some people can’t be helped, whatever you do.”

“We’re not talking about the knife in his guts here, are we? Way to encourage me to look forward to my new career in law enforcement, Jim, if you’re going to expect me to judge people that way!”

“I’m not talking about judging, I’m talking about letting things go. And you need to be able to do that to do the job.”

“Then maybe I shouldn’t be doing the job,” Blair muttered. He lifted hands in apology almost immediately. “I don’t mean it like that, it’s just a shitty mood talking.”

“You’re sure about that?” And speaking of things that should be let go…

“What does that mean? I wouldn’t be going ahead with the academy if I didn’t think it was something I could do.”

Something he could do, not something he wanted to do, and the good burger curdled in Jim’s stomach.

“So there’s no obfuscating going on there? A little white lie for the greater good?”

“I told as many white lies as I needed to weeks back, and I don’t need to tell any more,” Blair said with quiet calm. “So fuck you, Jim.” He gestured to the waitress. “The cheque, thanks,” he said to her. To Jim he said, “I’ll pay,” and Jim had enough sense left to not protest that.

It was quiet on the walk back to the car, quiet on the drive to the station. (“I might as well go there, after, since the store thing’s fallen through,” Blair had said earlier. “I can help out, the usual.”) 

“Chief, I’m sorry…” Jim said finally, as they pulled into the parking garage.

“Yeah, I figured you were,” Blair said. He turned to Jim rather than getting out. “Listen to me, okay? Because I obviously haven’t expressed myself clearly enough before.”

Jim nodded, and braced himself.

“It’d be stupid to pretend that I don’t have regrets about how everything went down. But we… I knew that something had to break. Either I stayed or I left, and I want to stay. Because you need someone to watch your back and I have some complicated emotions about the idea of somebody who’s not me doing that. We, uh, we care about each other, right?” Blair blushed as he said this. “And I…” he paused again. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m still interested in sentinels, you know? Just because I can’t share the information now doesn’t mean that seeing how this thing keeps on working isn’t important to me too.”

It was maybe ironic how Jim was okay these days with Blair’s second reason. You wouldn’t want it to be all about you, now would you, Jimmy, a snide voice said in the back of his head. Too much of someone getting hurt just for your sake could repeat on you, like a bad meal. Like water coughing up from saturated lungs.

“Message received loud and clear,” he said, trying to joke. 

“It had better be,” Blair said, not joking at all. He was just barely out of the truck when he made a startled noise and stood frozenly still, looking towards the garage entrance way.

“What?” Jim asked.

“Oh man. Talk about stress reactions.” Blair looked across the hood. “I thought I saw him – the guy on Hallstone, the late Mr Wilson?” He laughed nervously. “Of all the stupid… Come on. Maybe some good old fashioned paper work will ground me.

~*~

The countdown to the academy continued on; Jim would have been fine with that if it wasn’t for how Blair didn’t seem to take much pleasure in anticipation. He’d been eager enough after the first shock of the offer, but now… He seemed worn, tired. Jim wondered if the incident on Hallstone had made Blair realise that this was it, this was the future. The roller coaster ride was about to become the workaday grind.

He felt on edge himself. Stupid feelings, like something was wrong somewhere and he couldn’t figure it out; it certainly didn’t improve his own mood. That feeling of wrongness disturbed his sleep a couple of times, and he woke one night to realise that there was a light on downstairs. Jim decided that he needed a drink of water. A man got thirsty in the night.

He shrugged on his old robe and went downstairs. 

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry, did I wake you?” The light was on in Blair’s room but Blair himself was in a cross legged sit on the floor in the living area, which was dark except for the spilled glow from Blair’s room.

“No, no you didn’t wake me. I was thirsty,” Jim said. He didn’t bother turning on any more lights – he didn’t need them. He reached into a shelf for a glass, before putting it down on the counter and gathering his robe around him with a shudder. “God, it’s cold. Open a window or two, did you, Sandburg?”

“What?” Blair asked, startled far more than the question warranted. “Uh, no.” He paused. “But I went out on the balcony earlier. Sorry.” Maybe it was because Jim was tired and out of sorts at being awake this time of night, but Blair’s explanation sounded like an excuse, one of the silly obfuscations he used sometimes in the PD to excuse Jim’s slips with his senses.

Jim sat in the armchair, which put him neatly opposite Blair. “Meditating. At this time of the night, Chief?”

Blair shrugged in the dimness. “I couldn’t sleep, I figured I’d do something useful.”

“Hey, if it works for you,” Jim said, trying to put the right amount of gentle teasing into his voice.

Blair nodded. He didn’t look that relaxed in his meditation, and Jim sighed. Restless instinct sent him to the balcony doors. They were securely shut, of course they were. He opened them, shut them behind him and shivered slightly in the night air. Movement below caught his eye and he leaned over the balcony wall. Whoever, whatever it was, was out of sight. No sound, no movement that Jim’s senses couldn’t track to errant cats or the skitter of long dead leaves along the alleyway. He stepped back inside, and shivered again. How the hell did it end up cooler inside than out?

“I’m going to check out the heat tomorrow,” he said to Blair. “If I’m cold you must be a goddamn icicle.”

“I’ll live,” Blair said absently. “Good night, Jim.”

Well, that was Jim dismissed, wasn’t it. He climbed the stairs to bed, and got under his covers. That sense of something not right (aside from Blair’s weary, joyless meditation downstairs) swept him again, and he sent the senses out into every corner of his home, and then to its outside boundaries. Nothing.

The chill in the loft finally ebbed to something more temperate. Jim, still awake, heard Blair sigh and stand and go to bed. Blair slipped into a deep sleep almost as soon as he was in bed, and Jim followed soon after.

~*~

Jim had offered to bring back take-out. The food’s heat rose around his hand as it clenched the folded over carry-bag. It was the only warmth in the air – the night was getting cold.

Jim was coming from the north end of Prospect when he saw …something, some movement down the side alley. He quickened his step but didn’t break into a run, crossing the road and approaching along the sidewalk using the boundary of the neighbouring building as cover. He reached the alley way and saw a man. Some loiterer shouldn’t set the hairs on the back of his neck lifting the way they did. Jim ignored the cold, atavistic fear and stepped closer.

“This is my building. I don’t think I know you.”

An unwashed reek hit the air, and the man turned. He looked startled, and stepped back. Jim stood with his mouth open like a fool. He did know this man, or his face and his name at least. He’d last seen him being loaded into an ambulance a couple of weeks ago. Stan Wilson.

“What the hell?”

Wilson looked scared for a moment, and then something changed. He straightened, and then he smirked, the son of a bitch. He took another step back and was gone, simply not there any longer. Jim swore and leapt forward, but there was no sign of him except a lingering extra chill in the air. Jim stood there, anger rapidly overtaking confusion, as he put ideas together – Blair’s ‘stress reaction’ at the PD garage, his sleeplessness, Jim’s ongoing sense of something wrong.

A year ago, Jim would have thought he was crazy, suffering a little stress of his own. But there’d been Molly, and the fountain, since then and Jim walked up his stairs with both speed and deliberation.

He stalked into his home and dropped the food on the table with no care. He had other matters occupying his mind. Blair was in his room sorting through a box of books, texts and journals by the look of it. He looked up, startled at Jim’s unannounced presence in his doorway.

“When were you going to tell me about the puppy that followed us home?”

Blair stared, wincing at the sarcasm but clearly not understanding it. Then comprehension dawned, along with a tired dismay. He rose from his kneel on the floor and put out his hands in a familiar gesture.

“Hey, hey, look, Jim, I’m sorry. I’m dealing with it, I promise.”

“You’re dealing with it?

Blair’s voice began to rise. “Yes, I know it’s my mistake and I’m dealing with it, okay!”

“Sandburg…” All the righteous anger drained away, leaving just confusion, “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“I thought you had it all figured out – what with the interrogation currently.”

“I was not…” Jim took a deep breath. “I brought home some dinner. Let’s sit down and eat and work this thing out.”

Jim went to the kitchen. He laid plates and silverware on the table while Blair sat down and stared hopelessly at the food.

“You want some of the lo mein?” Jim asked.

“Yeah, sure. You got the cashew chicken?”

“You said you wanted it, I got it.” Jim dished a good serving of chicken and noodles both onto Blair’s plate and passed it over. Blair looked at it a moment and then began to eat, gradually gathering enthusiasm.

“I saw Stan Wilson hanging around the alley,” Jim eventually said.

“Yeah.” Blair sighed. “I can keep him out there, he doesn’t come in here, but he’s not going anywhere else, you know?”

Jim pinched the top of his nose. “I did notice he was there but I don’t know that I actually know anything, Chief. Why is he here?”

“I, uh, I think that I might have accidentally forged some sort of connection, not that I meant to. Because they might have called it in the hospital but I think he was probably dead before he got there, and I was just… thinking about him when he died.”

“I think about people all the time and I don’t recall seeing their ghosts hanging around.”

Blair lifted clasped hands to his mouth. Jim waited because that meant Blair was gathering himself to speak.

“After the fountain… for a while there I saw Janet, and Roy, and Incacha once. But it was more a sort of, hey there, sorry you’re dead and I’m not thing. Like nodding at a casual acquaintance across a room, but you’ve got other people to be talking to right now sort of deal.”

Jim nodded. There had been enough strangeness in their lives that taking all this at face value was ridiculously easy. “Janet and Roy I get, but why Incacha?”

“Jealous?” And that was just plain weird, like Blair was trying to start a stupid fight, like Blair was trying to… distract Jim.

“I’ve seen Incacha – in Sierra Verde. No, I’m not jealous, you putz, I’m curious.

Blair shifted in his seat. “I think… it might have been that we all had something in common – and Incacha had his own reasons, I’m pretty sure, but Janet and Roy? We all had a connection even if it wasn’t one I wanted to consciously think about, and then they were just there.”

A connection… cops were used to putting unpleasant associations together, and the most obvious connection between all those people, aside from Blair’s friendship with two of them, was that they were murder victims. Not even killed in hot blood or anger, any of them. All of them were killed because they were inconvenient, in the way of illegal money. Janet, Roy, Incacha. Blair.

“I was weirdly okay with it, Jim. The fountain was important, and I did some reading and some thinking, and I thought, okay, let’s see what else comes along.”

Jim took a slow breath in through his nose. “You’ll do great at the non-disclosure side of police work. You didn’t think that I’d maybe want to know about this?”

“Don’t start with me! You have never been okay with the mystical side of your senses, it makes you uncomfortable, well fine, Jim, but excuse me if I wanted to try and explore it, get some meaning out of what happened.”

“You being alive and okay was plenty of meaning,” Jim said, and stood, shifting plates and leftover food in awkward make-work. Blair’s eyes stayed on him, a pressure on his back and an itch on his skin. That gaze drew him back to the table, and Jim sat down again.

“So what’s the connection with our friend outside?”

That was shame on Blair’s face now, and embarrassment. “I guess I was in a self-pitying mood that morning. We ended up kindred spirits I think. Resentful. Regretting mistakes. And I hadn’t thought about what that meant if I was open to the spiritual aspects that I’m trying to be open to.” He shrugged. “So, I made a mistake there.”

“You’ve been half-assing this thing because you didn’t want me to know about it, haven’t you? Didn’t want me to notice books, or meetings with people who might help you figure this stuff out.”

“Yes! And I’m sorry, okay?”

Jim rubbed his hands over his face. “Chief, by the sound of it, it’s more like I should be sorry. And apologising.” He looked across the table. “Not exactly the first time, is it now?”

“I should have told you, but we’d had enough fights, and we were finally on the same page about at least a few things.”

“Yeah, I get it, Chief. We both wanted things to be okay again.” Because they cared for each other. Blair had expressed it that way in particular. Not because they were friends, but because they cared about each other. Jim could well imagine the ribald disdain such an admission would give rise to in police locker rooms. Complicated emotions, yes, they had those. And maybe somewhere down the track there would be another awkward conversation, but right now there was a more immediate issue.

“So what happens with good old Stan?”

“I don’t know. I get that he’s scared, but I don’t know how to send him on his way; and there is no way I’m letting him psychically squat in our home.”

“You’re keeping him at bay but that’s about all you can do.”

“He can’t hang on forever. I can feel that, but he’s giving it the good old college try and I get so tired!” His fist clenched on the table. “Sorry, that sounds about as pathetic as it actually is.”

“It’s not pathetic at all.” An idea came to Jim, and he headed for the couch. “Why don’t you sleep now?”

“Because Stan is on patrol out there looking for the ghost equivalent of an unlocked window?” Blair said with growled irritation.

Jim bowed his head a moment, looked at the plain every day khaki pants he wore. “I’ll watch for you. That’s what you’ve been doing, trying to keep him out. I can do that too.”

Blair stared at him with narrowed eyes. “You can, huh? I thought you… he paused. “Didn’t have time for that stuff.”

Jim looked away. “Doesn’t mean that I don’t know how it goes. Molly. The fountain. It’s there whether I like it or not. And I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“Jim, are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Go sleep, Sandburg.”

Blair shifted as if to stand, to head for his room.

Jim swallowed. “No, I mean here.” Might as well heap a little extra complication into this mess. He patted the couch seat beside him. “Symbolism. Watching your back.” 

Blair was silent at that, his eyes still turned to the wall that enclosed his room; his gaze was far, far away, past the bricks, past everything. Then he nodded, and without any self-consciousness walked to the couch and laid his head in Jim’s lap. Jim rested one hand on his shoulder. A long, weary sigh rose, and then quieter breathing that slowly, slowly dipped into the depths of sleep.

So simple after all, and so was what Jim needed to do. Jim knew how it went. The willingness was all, and the will came out of what you admitted you needed. The room turned blue around him. The air became humid, with an earthy tang that he both smelled and tasted. He was dressed as Enqueri –army-style drill pants shabby with long wear, a scarf around his head, the bow and arrow in his hands. He crouched under the shelter of a low-growing tree, watching over a sleeping man.

Blair was curled around himself – not how he usually slept, open and peaceful on his back in bed. He wore jeans and a t-shirt that Jim suspected would be a corn-flower blue in another light, and his hair was caught in a tail behind him with a complicated tie of beads and leather strings. There was a silver chain around his neck with the ankh pendant Jim had seen before drooping onto his bent arm, and around his right wrist, red as fresh blood but under the skin now, were the marks of Incacha’s hand.

“It’ll be okay, Chief,” Jim said quietly, and then he stood, listening, on guard. Knowing where to go was easy. The intruder wasn’t trying to be quiet, and couldn’t have been even if he had tried. To be silent in this place you needed to know it, to belong. Jim was silent, and the stranger flinched hard when Jim stepped out of the foliage and said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“So?” Stan Wilson questioned. “A lot of places I shouldn’t have been and I didn’t give a damn. You here to move me along?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, that’s what you do, isn’t it. Big man, big cop. Move people along so that nobody has to look at us. Tell you, that boy didn’t want me around he shouldn’t have opened the door.”

“Open doors are not, per se, invitations,” Jim said dryly.

“Screw you.”

That made two of them pissed off, Jim guessed. He remembered when Incacha had died, he’d faced his mirror-self here, a self who was a serenely sure of himself bastard. Jim had no serenity, wasn’t sure he ever would in this place, but he could be a bastard too, and he was sure of two things. Stan truly didn’t belong here, and that was hurting Blair. Either one of those was enough.

“This is a big place,” Stan continued with whining bravado. “Plenty of room for everyone.”

“Yeah, and you’re just loving it here, aren’t you. The land of milk and honey.” Jim’s sarcasm hit truth, because Stan looked ready to jump out of his skin at every bird call and rustle of vegetation, and he looked… frayed, in body as well as nerve.

“Well, where else am I supposed to go? It’s not like anywhere else around here is any different.”

“You’re dead, Stan. But you were scared and you’re hanging on when you shouldn’t.” Latching on to a brief moment of bitter compassion like users Jim had met everywhere.

“So where else should I go!” Stan wailed. “You wanna tell me that since you’re so fucking wise!”

Jim took a deep breath. He wanted calm, and since this was a place where you got what you thought about, some modicum of it came to him. “There’s a place to go.” He thought of a wolf turning away from him, and put that thought away. That was no memory for wherever he was now. “What do you remember? In the ambulance.”

Stan stared at the ground, at vines and earth. “Going down. I was going down and I was scared, and there was someone I could grab onto, so I did.”

And you’re letting go of him right now, Jim thought. But what he said was, “I used to hunt somewhere like this. Let’s go hunting, Stan.”

Stan looked comically surprised. “Me? Go hunting here?”

“I thought we’d go look for where you’re meant to be, because it’s not here, and you know that.”

“Somewhere less creepy would be good,” Stan muttered. “Well, come on, cop. You’ve got this bright idea, what do we do about it?”

Jim took another one of those calming breaths, because the temptation to push Stan face first into the bark of a tree and demand that he show some damn respect for this place, if not for Jim, bubbled up like water from a spring. He followed the next impulse, which was to walk in one particular direction. “Come on,” he said shortly, and they set off, away from the loft, away from Blair, heading somewhere else.

They walked a while, Jim increasingly sure of the direction, until they reached one certain point. Jim didn’t see anything other than the blue lit jungle, but he felt it – a stop, an ending, a cessation. This far and no further.

“What do you see, Stan?”

Stan swallowed. He was sweating, and he’d developed a limp because his feet were sore and he’d complained about that for most of their journey. “I can see a light.”

“That’s where you need to go.”

Stan did not look eager. He looked at that something ahead that Jim couldn’t see, he looked at the jungle behind them, he looked at Jim.

“What’s over there?” The man had one note to his voice, all the time; the whine, the complaint.

“I have no fucking idea and I don’t care,” nearly tumbled out of Jim’s mouth. But he remembered Blair’s voice in the bar on Dovedale. “Pretty harsh… all sorts of reasons…” “I don’t know,” he said, not quite as serene as his spirit doppelganger but calm enough. “It might be an ending, it might be judgement; it might be a second chance for all I know. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

Stan licked his lips, and Jim suspected that some of the reek now was fear. 

“You can’t stay here, Stan. You may as well go find out.”

“All well and good for you to say that. It’s not your time.”

“It’ll be my time soon enough.”

“But not now. All well and good for you.” But Stan took a few steps forward. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He took a deep breath, and ran forward in a panicky, flailing rush, his hands sheltering his face – and then he was gone.

Jim crouched in place for a minute or two. Respect. Making sure that Stan was actually gone, because Jim could be a suspicious man. Then he stood, and ran back the way he’d come, not out of worry for Blair, but because he felt free enough to run here.

Blair was where he’d left him, still asleep. Maybe it was the lift in Jim’s mood, maybe it was something about the atmosphere of the place about him, but Blair’s furled body didn’t look so defensive anymore. It was more reminiscent of a child curled in its mother’s womb, and Jim didn’t wake him. Instead he crouched down, and stroked Blair’s cheek. “See you on the other side, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, and sat beside him, leaning back against the tree to rest for himself.

~*~

When he opened his eyes again he had a crick in his neck where his head had leaned against the back of the couch, and he had a feeling that he’d been snoring. He wanted to shift, but Blair was still asleep, turned to his back as he often did, one hand resting across his chest. Gently, Jim brushed some loose strands of hair back from his face, but not gently enough. Blair woke and blinked up at him, half asleep still and peaceful.

Blair grinned. “Not your best angle.”

“I’m prepared to bet I have the best looking nose hair you’ll ever see.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Blair said, but awkwardness was creeping over both of them. Blair sat up and pivoted off the couch.

“How do you feel?” Jim asked.

“Like I just woke up.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“I do feel better. Rest does that.” 

“He’s gone.”

“You always did do intimidation better than me.”

“Hey, that just means I do bad cop, you do good cop when we hit that. That dynamic was a foregone conclusion anyway.”

“Oh, yeah. For sure. Dynamics r us.” Blair poured himself a glass of water and took a few sips. He turned back to Jim. He did look more rested, more vital, but all the energy in him came out in a troubled, desperate question.

“What sort of cops are we going to be, Jim? Because I… I might not have a grip on this thing but I want to, if only to avoid more mistakes like Stan. But I am absolutely one hundred percent certain that urban shamanism isn’t on the academy curriculum, or covered in the legal code in Cascade.” He came closer and stood over Jim. “And if we work together, there will be more situations like this. I know it. Are you…? Are you going to be okay with that?”

Jim knew he was going to have days he regretted saying yes to this, but you didn’t refuse back-up to your partner, and you didn’t refuse help to your friend. Not if you wanted to keep him in your life.

“You wanted to find a way to stay. I sure as hell wanted you to stay, or Simon and I never would have cooked up the badge offer. And if a few blue jungle nights are the price,” – Blair choked with unexpected laughter at that – “then I’m willing to pay it.”

Blair flopped on the couch beside him. “You say that now.”

“I do say it, and I mean it.”

“Yeah, okay.” Blair sighed and gazed up into the heights of the ceiling. “I think we need to figure out a cleansing ritual for the loft.”

“No sage.” It was automatic, and very sincere.

“No sage. But opening a few windows, even just, you know, cleaning. Any repetitive act has a meditative function, and me cleaning in here would probably induce some level of euphoria in you.”

Jim turned his head to glare, mostly jokingly. “Seems likely.”

“And maybe someone I know doing a short blessing ceremony? You wouldn’t even have to be here if you didn’t want to.”

“So long as they don’t use sage, or anything similar, knock yourself out.” There was a brief, peaceful pause, before Jim said, “You mentioned something about a cleaning ritual?"

“Asshole,” Blair said but he rose anyway.

“How about I give you a hand,” Jim said, and followed him.


End file.
